Why is aggressive behaviour on the rise among Russia’s children?

10 percent of children are the initiators of aggression. Source: Getty Images / Fotobank

According to Russian parents, children appear to be becoming more aggressive. Child psychotherapist Lev Perezhogin attempted to find out what the reasons are for child aggression and to find ways of averting its sometimes disastrous consequences.

According to Russian
parents, children appear to be becoming more aggressive. Recent years have also
been characterized by a marked increase in the number of child suicides. The
child psychotherapist and M.D. Lev Perezhogin, a senior research fellow at the P.N.
Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences’s V.P. Serbsky State
Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry attempted to find out what the
reasons are for child aggression and to find ways of averting its sometimes disastrous
consequences.

Wherewickedchildrencomefrom

Aggression can be either an action or a non-action. The
most important thing is that aggression must be directed at an object that does
not want to be treated in such a manner. There are three types of aggression,
as the psychotherapist immediately begins to explain.

“The first is physical (inherent to children, who are not
encumbered by social conventions due to their age, and animals). The second
type is verbal, when we express aggression by means of words. And the third is
indirect – the transfer of aggression to a third party or object. There is
another scenario – auto-aggression. This aggression is directed at one’s self –
suicides, self-mutilation, self-destructive behavior (alcohol, narcotics),” he says.

According to the expert, aggression arises from competition
among children and in the fight for attention from adults. “The breakdown in
the world of children is the same as for adults: 10 percent are the initiators
of aggression, 70 percent will respond and 20 percent avoid aggression by any
means possible. The optimal channel is when parents can direct their children
into falling into the 70 percent. ‘Answer them if they insult you, but never
offend anyone first.’ This is normal from the biological point of view of
aggression,” explains Perezhogin.

However, there is also pathological aggression, and it is
caused by serious psychiatric disorders – yet no more than 200 doctors are
working with these problems in Russia. And since there are so few specialists, pediatricians and
neurologists simply do not notice the worst pathologies, those on the level of
schizophrenia and autism.

“The number of children with disorders of the autistic
spectrum and early schizophrenia is currently rising to catastrophic
proportions,” says Perezhogin. “Such children are not aggressive because they
need something but because they need to be left in peace. They take any attempt
by another child to make friends or establish contact with them as aggression.
And they answer to that, as a rule, inappropriately, absurdly, and violently.”

Parents can influence such behavior by their child, but
only to a certain age and while the pathologic stereotype has not yet been
defined.

“Let’s take a child bully. His peers fear and respect him.
Teachers, of course, are not thrilled by such behavior, and he always ‘flies’
from parents,” says Perezhogin. “But for the child, the pluses outweigh the
minuses and everything lines up nicely. It is possible to change this
stereotype in a child up until puberty, but after that it is too late. Child
aggression is corrected through the help of medicines and psychotherapeutic
work.”

“The problems are that we have catastrophically too few
specialists and the treatment itself is objectively very expensive,” explains
the expert.

Perezhogin notes that there is now a clear trend among
adolescents to increasingly devalue human life. “Life is no longer of special
value anymore, just a banal resource like some sort of thing or food. Today
suicide over unrequited love is not common because love is not in fashion; sex
is. If an object of interest rejects physical contact, it does not stir up
particular emotions in a teenager, as finding a replacement is very easy. A
substitution of concepts is currently taking place. Consumer society extends
not only to things; people today have begun to consume each other,” he says.

What parents can do

Parents do not know their children very well and do not
talk to them very much, so they can rarely have an idea what their child may be
going through. Moreover, there are some adults who encourage aggression or
justify their behavior by saying they are supposedly protecting their children.

“If a child complains to his parents that other children
are bullying him at school or outside the home, there are two aspects of
primary importance concerning parents’ proper behavior: First, provide the
child with moral support and analyze the situation together with him, and [then]
help him find a way to resolve the conflict,” explains Perezhogin.

The expert recommends helping the child formulate a value
system. “As an example, to explain what he needs and is worth fighting for, what
is not so important or whose importance depends on the situation, and what he
does not need at all and it is easier to give up. The more complex the entire
system of human responses the better, and a child needs also to be taught these
reactions,” says the psychotherapist.

“This system of diverse behaviors is never created on
paper. It only gets worked out in practical life situations. By the way,
children usually gain these skills in the process of cooperating with peers and
adults, and parents must approve of appropriate aggression and disapprove of
inappropriate aggression; that is all. But when there is no interaction between
parents and a child, nothing will be achieved.”